From the author of

From the author of

Dateline: Beverly Hills

Just about everything I know about the future becoming the present I learned
from watching Star Trek and The Jetsons.

In 1968, Kirk posed a question to this thing that he addressed as
"Computer," and, sure enough, it responded with the answer to his
question. Bones talked to Jim via his "communicator," and Spock's
"tricorder" provided detailed analytic data of the surrounding
environment. Today, any one of us can talk to a computer via telephone, many of
us have PDAs, and cell phones do just about everything that Star
Trek's communicators did (save the ability to get a decent beam up on
request). MRI machines even tell us just about anything we want to know about
the anything that we pass through the MRI.

On the Jetsons side of the fence, Jane had her robot and completely
automated, buttonized kitchen, while George was still hounded by his boss, Mr.
Spacely. (Some things never change.)

So, when my bosses at InformIT caught my pitch to do an article on the wired
kitchen, I thought that the roadmap was set. All I had to was to go where the TV
shows of future past took me. I sort of figured that the ability to assemble
molecules out of thin air in order to make a luscious soufflé was still
beyond our technological grasp. But I was sure the ability to fire up the
microwave, put the dishwasher into heavy clean mode, and turn up the
refrigerator in my kitchen from anywhere on the planet was more a matter of
money than technology.